


Topographies

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Skies
Genre: Brief Sexual Content, Loss of Identity, Mindfuck, Other, POV Second Person, Self-cest, light body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 12:12:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18810664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: Piranesi will change you utterly. There’s no way out but through.





	Topographies

Distances are wrong here.

That’s what bothers you most, you think. The passages stretch too long and then end too abruptly; walls bend in ways that hurt to look at, and don’t meet right at the corners; the light from your lantern shivers and slinks across algae-slick stone like a thing alive and frightened. You’re frightened too, in this place suffused with dripping echoes, but it’s better to press on then stay here, and so you lift that lantern high and keep going, one foot in front of the other, into the dark.

You’ve learned the rules of Piranesi, much good they do you now. The first rule of them: do not look back. 

There’s a story like that, or several. They blend together in your mind as you traverse the canals of the lower levels, moving ever forward. Do not turn, one tale goes, to learn who walks behind. Do not let yourself see what happens to the ones who remain. So, no – whether that’s cold breath or cold breeze on the back of your neck, you’ll never know for sure.

You shy from the Warrens, though the Deformer calls out to you like a proud parent might call a child. Not there, you think. Not ever. ( _Not yet._ ) Fleeing the depths, you climb up – and up, and _up_ , along a thin, twisting stair, across a bridge that arcs above a cage-hung pit. Avoid the thin eyeless figure that crouches on a ledge, rattling those cages with an iron pike; you don’t want to meet him here, with a shackle on your wrist.

You are followed, you think. You are followed, but you don’t look back, and as you climb, the distances open up around you and grow stranger.

You stumble through a forest of granite pillars, cracked and crumbling, while chains above you creak and sway in a wind that does not exist. You fight through thorny vines that climb from fissures in dry stone, in a place where water once ran. After days or weeks, years or minutes, you find your way to a plain of chessboard floors, where every marble or onyx tile is large as a city square and great chess-pieces lie toppled, discarded where they lie. It’s there that you fall, beneath an arc defined by the span of a vanquished pawn, and there you curl your knees against your chest and wrap your head in your arms, certain that your blistered feet are leading you not out but further in.

Once, you flew. Once, you rode the void winds in a chariot of steel, and no prison could hold you. You need to forget these things, if you are to leave this place, but you cannot.

You sleep instead, fitfully, with the taste of tears in your mouth. You dream that something watches you, cold and patient, pitiable; you feel it reach out, feather-light, to drink the salt from your eyes. And you wake to a brushwood fire – _Where is there wood, in this place?_ – and a tune played on a flute.

Uncurl yourself. Look up. A woman in a long brown coat watches you from across the fire; her flute is lowered now, and only the moan of wind and the crackle of flame interrupt the silence. 

You recognize her: an older prisoner than most, deceptive in her plain clothing and unaffected mannerisms. She’d been a monstrous thing, she’d told you once, a killer of words – but she might have changed more than she intended, because there is kindness in her eyes.

She takes a step in your direction. Light bends and ripples, and she’s there in front of you, crouching down.

“You used to bring me books,” she says. “I won’t forget it.”

In this place, that means something more than just a platitude. She cups your face in one warm hand, helps you to your feet and kisses you gently – _For remembrance,_ she tells you, and you shudder.

“There’s a lot of time in the universe,” she says, with a brisk cheer that eyou think is meant to be comforting. “You’ll find your way out eventually. If you choose to.”

You do not see her walk away; one step to the side, and she is elsewhere. Distances are different for everyone in Piranesi, and you won’t catch her if you try, but the solitude closes around you like a trap, and you cannot make yourself care about what you already know. You run after her, calling out without knowing what you mean to say, beyond _Don’t leave me here alone_.

The open plain constricts around you. You’re in the depths again.

*

A logic puzzle, paradox: this is a prison. Once, no prison could hold you. If this one can, then surely you are changed?

But should you be changed enough to leave, then you were never changed at all, and so the walls will close again around you, and the stairs stretch and twist, and maybe there’s something different you need to do to make this end. You lift your head, and find yourself laughing, clutching at your face, your fingers scratching runnels in your skin. The Glib Performer took his own eyes, so he wouldn’t see what he made of himself. The Warrens would be better than that, but you‘re not sure you can find the Warrens again.

*

Time is wrong here. More wrong than in Albion, where it twisted and snapped and snarled like a flag in the wind, but what happened mostly stayed happened. Here, you can reach back, unspool the past and string it up cat’s cradle between your fingers:

You were London-born – weren’t you? Yes. Yes, from London. Your mother was a Countess, and taught you embroidery and marksmanship. Your mother was a soldier and a drunk, and she once got herself jailed for setting alight all the rose bushes in some Countess’s garden, and never did tell you why. You had no mother, and ran the rooftops in search of a new wind. You killed three people by the time you were twenty, and died twice, and sold hats in the intervening time. You are not yet twenty, and you want to see the skies.

That scar across your face – was that accident or malice? Do you have a scar there at all? Perhaps what you have is knotted bone, or pulsating amber, or a proliferation of eyes.

Were you ever mad? Do you want to be?

Were you ever in love?

The past strains, frays, unweaves. It is what you make it. 

Now you are dancing beneath crystal chandeliers, and a lady’s hand, white-gloved, rests delicately on the small of your back; now, you recline on a velvet couch, talking art and revolution while some aristocrat’s wild son unfastens your belt to take your cock in his careless hand; now, you are shoved up against the wall of a dirty alley with your trousers around your ankles, your hands tangled in a Spite courier’s hair and three fingers up your cunt. The wall in front of you is seared with Correspondence graffiti – and the light of a thousand candles blurs as you spin across the ballroom floor, and a Radical Poetess demonstrates the steps of an Infernal dance-sonnet with drunken grace – and there’s a second, before you close your eyes in the grip of climax, when you can almost understand what all of it means.

Do not look back. These things are not for you. Not any longer.

You are in Piranesi, where lamplight glances off walls that correspond to no known geometry. You are alone. It is not the day it was.

*

Time passes, though it’s hard to say how much.

You walk a labyrinth now of drowned passages, spiraling out and circling back. When you are hungry – when you remember how to be hungry – you eat white blind fish that swim in still dark pools, and when you are thirsty, you drink condensation. Your mouth tastes of something sharp and mineral. Your hands are thin, skin stretched tight over brittle bone, and sometimes in the wrong light it seems like you have too many fingers.

In this place, all light is wrong.

Sounds are wrong: too close, too far, echo first and then the noise that caused it. Perception here cannot be trusted. 

Still, you are certain now: there is something behind you, other than the gleeful, laughing Chaplain that tracks you in a sadist’s game of hide-and-go-seek. That Chaplain leaves from time to time, when he grows bored of you or duty calls him elsewhere. The shadow stays. The sound it makes against the walls and floor is faint and dry, like discarded snakeskin, and even the corrupted topographies of Piranesi do not shake it off your trail.

You dream of it, when you remember how to sleep, and in your dreams, its voice is like a birdcall: _Who-am-I? Who-am-I? Who?_

It is only a ghost of itself, a creature that steals your sorrow for sustenance, but still you wish you could answer.

*

Second rule: give no nameless thing a name.

You should have guessed that one even before you learned it; a bat-winged creature told you once that charity is a crime, before it sold you a thing it valued for no more than a penny. You cannot remember any longer what it is that you bought, or why you wanted it, but you remember the lesson: take the rules in your hands and twist them until you find a way. You laugh and laugh, and think that it doesn’t matter, because you have nothing left to give away.

*

Third rule, third rule, third rule. You learned it to your detriment. You cannot forget it. When you crawl to the entrance, centuries hence, the third rule will be burned into your eyes and tattooed beneath your tongue.

Cut them out, you think. Be speechless, be blind, be like the creature that torments you. Replace your eyes with mirror glass, and see a different way.

Or you might open your ribcage instead, dig your fingers in and find your beating heart. Would a clockspring be better? Would a nightingale, trapped and singing? They have birdcages on the upper levels, though what lives inside them are not birds.

Stitch up your skin, then, with sinew and wire and embroidery thread. You have new things inside you. Keep walking. Forget, forget.

Find the Warrens. Fling yourself in, crawl and wriggle through the dark, emerge slick and malleable as clay. Bend your bones until they spiral inward like this place does, reweave your veins into a map to lead you out. It will not work, but do it anyway. Mold, unform, remake.

Forget.

You are drowning. You are burning. You are broken on the wheel, and even your bones are altered. You are the dust brushed from a moth’s wings.

It is dark here, and you do not exist.

And in the dark, the formless thing that follows comes to you, slithering, catching at your ankles with cold tendrils. It means no harm, you think. It’s only lonely. 

Distances are wrong in Piranesi. Geometries are wrong. _Time_ is wrong. Everything bends back on itself, branching and recursive, and where you are is where you have been is where you will be again. And throughout it all, you never were alone.

You think you know now, what name this thing should have.

You reach down towards it, and it flows up your arms, wraps itself around what’s left of flesh; you cradle it in the hollow of your ribcage, the spaces between your fingers, barely anything left of it but a fragile skein of self. It has changed utterly, and changed again, and now you change it one last time. You whisper a word to the darkness, to the hungry places, offered up along with everything that isn’t yours any longer. Spoken, it passes from you, and leaves you emptier than you were before.

In the silence after, something changes. That grip on your shoulder – not inchoate matter, but fingers, five of them, calloused from work in the Engine Yards. London-born, yes. Did you run the rooftops, before you went North? Or was it a different story led you here?

You lift a hand to your face – the scar there only a scar, and you do not know its origins – and then you pull yourself trembling into your arms. You could tell yourself the story of this body, if you still had the words, if you needed them. Instead, you touch, running your hands up thin arms, feeling body-warmth beneath your palms. This is your spine, and these, your shoulders, bruised and pale after too long in the dark. This mouth that you kiss is yours, and the hands that venture hesitant down over your hips, drawing aside the rags and tatters that once made up your clothing. 

You lay yourself down in a circle of shivering lantern light, and relearn yourself: the pulse that flutters at your wrists and your throat, the slope of your ribcage and the angle of your knees, the aching need that comes with being touched. You hear the shaky sound you make, reaching down, arching up to meet your hand between your legs. There, now, remember this: the heat against your fingertips as you stroke, the salt of sweat on your tongue, your muffled gasp as you press your face into the hollow of your shoulder and bring yourself shuddering to completion. You have done this before and will do this again, in other times and places, with other people who will never know what it is like to be unmade. Here and now, you cling to yourself as your breathing slows, and in every point of contact, you recognize yourself for the first and last time.

It is dark. You brush a finger over your cracked lips, touch your closed eyes ( _no mirror-glass there_ ), and accept that you will not remember this.

You exist.

You lift yourself on shaking legs and step back from yourself, though you hold hands for a while longer, though your fingertips part last; this old, new thing cannot be free until it stands alone, and neither can you. 

You watch yourself step into darkness with no lantern at your wrist, and then you turn, at long last, to look behind you.

( _Will you be salt, then, and blow away in the wind? Will you be zee? Perhaps you’ll fly again._ )

At your back, you hear the echo of flute-song, loud against the silence. In front of you, light streams through an open door.


End file.
